The world is just beginning to feel the impact of AI on the job market, according to Kristalina Georgieva, director of the International Monetary Fund. The coming disruption, she said, was akin to a “slow-moving tsunami” and warned that young workers could be among the hardest hit.
“The people we need to worry about most of all are young people entering the job market,” Georgieva said at an event on the sidelines of the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Bangkok on Monday.
“Normally, they would go into these routine, repetitive jobs and then work their way up. But if they disappear, I don’t think a young person wants to become a barista in a coffee shop as a future career.”
The IMF estimates that around 40% of jobs worldwide will be expanded, downgraded or eliminated as AI advances.
Georgieva added that technology is already reshaping the labor market: workers with AI-related skills earn more, but this has not translated into large-scale job growth. Meanwhile, lower-paying jobs, including jobs in restaurants and data center construction, are increasing.
Middle-skilled workers whose jobs are highly exposed to automation risk being left behind, with advanced economies facing a particularly large impact.
“Breaking the myth that AI will reduce the demand for people,” Georgieva said. “What this does is displace current demand. That may not be the case in the future.”
Singapore’s president warns that Generation Z will “lose confidence in the future” if entry-level talent pipelines are not repaired.
It is not yet too late to build flood barriers. Governments, Georgieva said, must rethink education for a world in which workers can no longer expect to learn a certain set of skills and use them throughout their careers.
One way to encourage this thinking is to focus on the budgetary implications: major disruptions to the labor market will lead to lower spending and, therefore, lower tax revenues, leaving governments in dire financial straits, she added.
Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who joined Georgieva on stage, acknowledged this reality.
“The entry level of employment, your first job after graduation, is now seeing less demand,” he said. In Singapore, 74.4% of university graduates obtained full-time employment in 2025, compared to 79.4% in 2024, according to data reported by the Straits Times.
Shanmugaratnam argued that governments should view this challenge as a long-term structural problem, rather than waiting for it to develop into a crisis. He pointed to the policy responses that followed the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic as potential models for helping workers adapt to a changing economy.
Without this establishment, he warned, there could be a domino effect: more graduates competing for fewer jobs.
“We can’t afford to lose that, because if you lose that, not only will you have this cohort of young people who will wait a year and then be competing with the next cohort the following year, but you’ll also lose over a year of skills,” Shanmugaratnam said. “You lose a whole set of intangible attributes and you lose confidence in the future.”
This erosion of trust is already reverberating on the streets of France, where hundreds of thousands of students have participated in protests against deteriorating school facilities and called for increased funding for education.
From Sam Altman to Donald Trump, some leaders see a more optimistic future for AI jobs
While Georgieva and Shanmugaratnam warn of AI’s potential to disrupt the job market, other figures have taken a more optimistic tone or acknowledged that the technology’s impact has been slower to materialize than expected.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, acknowledged that AI has not yet eliminated white-collar jobs at the rate he predicted.
“I’m happy to be wrong about that,” Altman said in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn in May. “I thought eliminating entry-level white-collar jobs would have had more impact today than it actually happened.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously warned that AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, also offered a more nuanced view of how automation could reshape work.
“If you automate 90% of the work, then everyone does 10% of the work,” Amodei said. “And that 10% expands until it’s 100% of what people are doing and 10 times their productivity. »
As for world leaders, President Donald Trump remained optimistic that the technology — which he recently said should instead be called “super intelligence” — will ultimately create more jobs than it destroys.
“I think AI is going to be a tremendous job creator,” Trump told the New York Times in January. He added that there will be “so many jobs” that “we won’t have enough people to fill the jobs, and that’s where robots come in.”
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